NUDES

There is often a misunderstanding about the aims of my works with drawing robots. Often it is thought or written in articles that my objective is to get the robots draw like humans. Meaning in this context for the drawing would be to be indistinguishable from a human made drawing. In reality this has never been my aim. I consider that the consequence of having such an objective would be only to have systems capable of producing pastiches rather than drawings true to the system. By true to the system, I mean drawings whose style is influenced and shaped in part by the robot’s characteristics. A robot has a different perceptual system, memory, a different morphology: electrical motors are not muscles, computer vision has very little relation to human vision, etc. the drawing style should be the result of these traits. The aim for my drawings has always been for them to act on the viewer in the same manner as a handmade drawing would, rather than getting a robot to produce drawings mimicking the appearance of a handmade drawing. The drawing has to work both as a representation of the subject and as an ensemble of lines which interplay acts on the observer to trigger a rich perceptual and aesthetic experience.

When we see the oldest human marks, the ochre engraving from the Blombos caves, they do not amount to much, few geometric traces, zigzag, parallel lines, criss crosses, etc. When looking at marks engraved on these pieces or rock, immediately we know that someone has made these traces, and that this individual has a similar awareness of what he was doing, that he deployed the same decisions and actions as we would. This phenomenon exists in relation to any manmade object, but when we see an axe, pottery, a building, or a sculpture, we perceive that conscious human processes have been involved in their production, but it is remote as it is unlikely that we would be able to reproduce the processes that have been deployed. Most people can not understand ancient writing, with drawing there is a stronger element, we could all have done this, everybody has made a mark, or made a movement to leave a trace. This trace becomes a physical memory of a movement, of the decision to make this motion with almost no intermediary. When the paintings in Lascaux caves were discovered what were considered our distant almost not yet human predecessor became our ancestors not that far from us. In my artistic practice in general, and in Human Traits exhibition in particular, I deal with gestures and movements that lead us to trace the humanness embodied within these acts.